


Worked Themselves To Exhaustion

by icewhisper



Series: Holiday Cheer & Tears [16]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 18:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: The first time Mick noticed it, he’d thought it was his imagination or the booze. Barry had been zipping around in the wake of the Dominators, caught in some kind of race with Supergirl, and somewhere in the warm crackle of lightning he felt as Barry ran past him…It had felt like Len.





	Worked Themselves To Exhaustion

The first time Mick noticed it, he’d thought it was his imagination or the booze. Barry had been zipping around in the wake of the Dominators, caught in some kind of race with Supergirl, and somewhere in the warm crackle of lightning he felt as Barry ran past him…

It had felt like Len.

A breath of coolness in the warmth. The feeling of a presence at his right.

Then, lightning faded to nothing and it was gone.

He didn’t ask anybody about it – didn’t want the uncomfortable, pitying looks the Legends would give him or the weirdly proud one the Flash would have. He shook it off and moved on.

But the Legion came with its psychos, Rip, and a Len who didn’t _feel_ like Len, and the sensation came back. Heart hammering in his chest as Thawne moved around them, Mick thought he felt him. He’d glanced to his right once, mouth open to say Len’s name and tell him they should try to catch the speedster between the streams, but there had been no one there.

Then, there was.

It wasn’t one of Thawne’s, he didn’t think. It didn’t look like him the way the others did. It didn’t look human with its body and tattered red suit rotting away. For a moment, he’d thought it was Barry before he realized the body was too big. A different speedster, he realized, but there wasn’t time to try to figure out more than that.

It caught him with a hard punch to the jaw that sent him to the ground. He tasted blood and spit it out.

Grinned up at the thing with pink teeth.

Yeah. This was more fun.

\---

Mick was going to lose.

Len watched, eyes wide in horror as the speedster – Len _had_ been calling him SkeleFlash, but it didn’t feel like the time for a funny nickname – took Mick down to his knees again. Again. Again. Again. Mick couldn’t beat it, not with a heat gun that barely did more than tickle it, and the others were too focused on the Legion to be any help.

A him – magic-controlled and seeing things that weren’t real – killed a Mick that didn’t really exist. It still made nausea rise in him, guilt churning his gut for something he hadn’t even remembered doing until the Oculus had blown him to pieces.

One Mick dead, another well on his way, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

He tried to get between them, but the speedster phased through and Len wasn’t sure if it was the thing’s own abilities or because he couldn’t hold a proper form in the real world anymore. He was half in the timestream, half in the Speed Force. He clung to the lightning the speedster made, used the energy it left behind to keep him in place.

It wasn’t enough to help Mick and he watched with a dawning horror as Mick pulled the temperature control off his gun. “Wanna see if you can outrun the heat?” he called out, cracked and bleeding lips spread out into a manic grin.

The speedster caught him.

Everything burned.

No bodies were left behind.

 

 

The team mourned and moved on like they had with him.

No body to bury. No family to pass the news to. Mick’s things got packed up and put into storage next to Len’s own, left to gather dust until someone could stomach the thought of throwing it out.

Len searched. To the others, Mick was dead. It made sense that he’d be dead, burned up in a blaze of glory the way he’d always wanted to. Len knew better. Len could feel him the way he could taste time on his tongue, sweet and smooth when the timeline was moving in the right direction, bitter and tacky when it wasn’t.

Mick was in the lightning.

The Oculus in his head – more feeling than voice – fought him when he pulled himself from the timestream, head lit up with a migraine like he hadn’t felt since he’d blinked hazily out at the water in Central and tried to remember how he’d gotten there. He went anyway, pulled away until the green tones of the timestream had bled out to the blue of the Speed Force.

He glared at the figure shaped like his mother. It wasn’t her, the same way it wasn’t Mick or Lisa or Barry. It never was. “Where is he?”

“You’re powerless,” it reminded him, head tilted curiously. “What is it you plan to do?”

The grin Len gave was all teeth. He’d never needed powers to ruin some asshole’s day.

 

 

He searched. Searched. Searched.

His feet ached in ways they shouldn’t when he didn’t have a true body. His body dragged like it missed the sleep he didn’t need anymore.

He kept searching, chasing trails of lightning to different wheres and whens, but it wasn’t the right one. Different speedsters. Different Barrys. One speedster, lit up with blue lightning that looked too familiar, turned out to be a him from another Earth.

It was the first time Len had laughed in weeks.

It got harder to hold onto the lightning, like whatever his not-body was now was finally starting to tire out. He didn’t care. He didn’t stop. He held on tighter and kept going until he found the right trail.

Mick was unconscious when he finally found him, tied up with runed chains and body fading away the way people’s did when they were in the Speed Force too long. Len wanted to fight, wanted to take the thing to pieces for trying to take Mick away.

He got Mick out instead, hands burning when they touched the runes until Len thought they might melt right off his wrists. Too heavy. Too real. They destroyed Mick because he didn’t belong, but Len had time coursing through his veins and a power that wasn’t his to use.

Runes wanted to make him real in ways he didn’t think he could be anymore.

He got Mick somewhere safe, hidden away with one of the more sympathetic Speed Force entities. It wore Barry’s face, brows creased in concern when Len laid Mick at its feet. “Open up a door,” he told it. “Send him home.”

“You missed him,” it said curiously, “but you don’t want him to stay with you.”

“Keeping him ain’t worth destroying him.”

He didn’t kiss Mick goodbye as the thing with Barry’s face opened a door. He could see STAR Labs on the other side and the wide-eyed horror as the real Barry stared into it.

“Snart? How…”

Knelt by Mick’s side, hand still held in his, Len gave Barry a sad smile. “Take him home,” he told him when Barry met them at the door.

Barry pulled Mick through, but his eyes were still stuck on Len when the door closed again.

\---

  
“He’s in there,” Mick said hollowly when Barry told him.

“It makes sense,” Caitlin offered. “If Barry can manipulate time with his speed, it wouldn’t be odd for the two to be connected.”

“How do we get him out?”

The look she gave him was all sympathy. “I don’t think we can.”

\---

The speedster chased him, angry and howling at Len for stealing Mick away. As if Mick had been its to keep.

He wasn’t.

Mick hadn’t even been Len’s to keep.

It chased him deep into the hollow spot of a mountain, its growl vibrating. Len stared back at it calmly, even as the chains in his hands made everything heavy. Real.

He didn’t remember moving. He was only slightly aware of the fight in the cramped space. Of him locking the chains around the speedster’s waist when it was half-phased into the stone.

More aware of the blood pouring from his side where its hand had cut into him like a knife.

“Fuck off,” he told it, blood dripping from his lips as he reached out with a tired hand and caught the fading trails of another speedster’s lightning.

Not-Barry stared down at him when he collapsed near it. “Humans will die for love,” it said, like it couldn’t fathom the concept. “How many times do you plan to die for him?”

Len didn’t answer, but he passed out with a grin.

 

 

Mick was holding his hand when he woke up, fingers of his free hand tracing patterns up the inside of his arm. “You stupid fucking bastard.”

Later, Len would see the chain’s runes tattooed across his body like a holding spell.

For right then, Mick kissed him and held on while Len succumbed back to sleep.

The End


End file.
